Title: Autograph Letter Signed, "Elizabeth" - 1852 first woman doctor in America at odds with radical suffragettes
Author: Blackwell, Elizabeth
Description: 1 pp. + stampless address leaf. To her brother Samuel in Boston. Enclosing a 2-page letter to her from her brother Henry in Cincinnati, June 15, 1852.Three years after she received her medical degree from Geneva College in New York – becoming the first woman M.D. in America - Elizabeth Blackwell was practicing Medicine in New York. She had already become a celebrity to American feminists, though she privately thought the first women suffragettes to be well-intentioned but lacking in “clear thought”. At the second national Women’s Rights Convention in October 1851, Harriot Kezia Hunt, who had practiced medicine (without an M.D.) before Blackwell after being turned down for entrance to Harvard, gave a speech critical of male chauvinism at the established medical schools. Blackwell did not attend the convention (which, incidentally, was chaired by Paulina Wright Davis, with whom she had once studied Anatomy), but sent a restrained letter of support, reprinted in the New York Tribune, which was praised in this letter from her brother Henry as “short, sensible, and eminently non-committal, in which last, I think you are right. Altho I am fully embued with their doctrine, bloomers not excepted, you cannot safely identity yourself with them, as the want of good common sense gumption which often marks their proceedings would render you liable to be placed in false position. In fact, they have almost succeeded in getting you into one, in this instance, owing to Miss Hunt's following up the reading of your letter and her own remarks by a string of unwise resolutions reflecting upon Harvard, Geneva and Cleveland Schools, thereby as it were doing what they can to put the passive resistance of those schools to the new idea, into an active and antagonistical position, in mere self defense. I think Miss Hunt must lack judgment." Elizabeth passed Henry’s letter on to her brother Sam, noting that, besides a “charming little visit” to the North American Phalanx, the Socialist commune successor to Brook Farm, where her sister Anna had lived for a time, and attending a speech by Kossuth (“God bless him!”), the exiled Hungarian democratic revolutionary, a hero to American liberal reformers, she had just met with Harriot Hunt, whom she described diplomatically as “an original character”. Being focused on practical measures to bring more women into Medicine, Elizabeth was less committed to the broader movement for women’s rights than Davis and Hunt – and two other women who were destined to become her sisters-in-law – Sam’s future wife, Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be an ordained Protestant Minister, another keynoter at the 1851 Convention; and Lucy Stone, who later married Henry after attending the Convention shockingly dressed in “Bloomer” pants. Letters of Elizabeth Blackwell are rarely found outside of institutions, most of her family correspondence being held by the Library of Congress and the Radcliffe-Schlesinger Library at Harvard. Transcript of the full text of both letters available on request.
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Date Published: June 21, 1852

A bit of yellowing; very good to near fine.